Deadly Dull 

The much-hyped teaming of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts turns out to be not much of a teaming -- the two mega-stars are kept apart for most of the running time of The Mexican. This would probably be a fatal miscalculation even if the rest of the movie weren't deadly dull. But it is, and it's endless.

Pitt is a loser with the loserish name Jerry Welbach. Jerry's in trouble with the mob, and can extricate himself only by rolling down to Mexico and retrieving an ornate antique gun. His girlfriend Sam (Roberts) is none too happy about this, and declares the relationship finito. However, she is kidnapped by a hit man (James Gandolfini), an event that is connected to the finding of the gun. Jerry's adventures in Mexico at least have a kind of conventional suspense about them (he finds the gun, he loses the gun, he stumbles into complications). But nothing happens in Sam's part of the movie, save for repetitive discussions about relationship issues with the extremely sensitive kidnapper.

In fact, it feels as though Sam's story is artificially padded out for the simple reason that Julia Roberts has been cast in the role. She has no dramatic function for most of the story, and Roberts really strains to make something, anything, happen. Her chemistry is decent with Gandolfini (whose character revelation is not nearly as surprising or fascinating as the filmmaker assume it is), but they sometimes look like acting students trying to create an interesting improv out of a poorly conceived sketch.

And her chemistry with Brad Pitt? Who can say? They're only on screen together for a few minutes. The main love story in the movie actually takes place a century ago, in the Mexican town where the gun was crafted. We keep coming back to this story with deadening regularity, and it's difficult to tell whether director Gore Verbinski is putting it out there with a straight face.

Verbinski made an interesting feature debut with Mouse Hunt, a bizarre dark comedy with Nathan Lane and a bunch of rodents. All of that is gone with The Mexican, which has the bloated, tentative feel of star vehicle with too much riding on it. Apart from an apparent desire to "do a Peckinpah," and a few good bits with a stray dog in a pickup truck, this movie has even less directorial initiative than it has romantic spark.